What Kenna had kept to herself for decades was the truth about Dalgen Avernon’s death, for the causes were not natural, as everyone in the demesne had believed: not unless you counted an assassin’s work paid for by Lord Vikal, a scheming Lord Minor from Realm Grisengahl, as a natural occurrence.

‘Bloody hell,’ said Lord Alvix now. ‘Kenna, will you look at this?’

He was in the centre of the lab chamber, surrounded by a plethora of holovolumes: sheaves of numbers; intricate, shifting phase spaces rendered in a thousand hues where every nuance of colour held meaning; and many-dimensioned emergenic maps, which tracked the generation of properties emergent from complex substrates, always checking and attempting to predict the emergence of order from chaos.

Alvix’s self-mending tunic had failed to do so: his faded once-black-now-grey garment looked as if a rat had been chewing at the sleeves. In public he knew how to dress with propriety, but when he withdrew himself from matters political, he became the distracted scholar he was meant to be.

‘Not that old thing,’ said Kenna.

Lord Alvix laughed.

‘My grandfather’s great disappointment,’ he said. ‘But look at these gamma-rays.’

‘Holy shit.’ Kenna absorbed the readings, allowing herself to feel surprised. ‘You’ve found a second temporal phenomenon.’

Was this the beginning of a successful logosophical attempt to read the future? It was over a century ago that Max Gould, dear Uncle Max, director of Labyrinth’s intelligence service, had despatched her here – or rather, despatched Rhianna Chiang – to investigate the rumour.

‘I always thought,’ Kenna added, ‘that only the kaon-antikaon thing was sensitive to the direction of time. But this one was always there, waiting to be seen.’

‘Yes,’ said Alvix. ‘Except that I never thought I would see it.’

He dimmed the holovolumes, except for one that he shifted to the centre, and caused to magnify and brighten. Inside, successive layers of spherical waves, with a common centre, shrank inwards to that central point and were absorbed.

Over and over, wavefronts diminished to nothing.

In terms of subatomic process, the kaon reaction stands alone; but there is one other phenomenon not seen in nature, because it would be the equivalent of a smashed egg reforming. Emissions of radiation outwards from a point are common; what is rarely seen is the reverse: spherical wave-forms shrinking inwards – except that was what the data was showing Alvix now.

‘I’m going to call them spinpoints,’ he said. ‘Singularities being born. They’re appearing in the regions around Nulapeiron where the kaon-antikaon decay was most strongly affected before. Just look how they behave.’ He could not stop smiling. ‘Time to contact l’Academia. This is going to cause such a stir.’

‘Or you could call on your friends’ – Kenna meant his allies – ‘to fund a private research effort.’

Alvix paused, then: ‘Practicalities. That’s why I like you hanging around, Kenna. Unless you’ve reconsidered my offer.’

‘Of a drone body? I thank you again, my Lord,’ she answered. ‘And decline once more, with gratitude.’

‘We’re alone. You don’t need the polite rigmarole.’ He grinned. ‘And point taken. You’ll help me work through the details?’

‘Of course I will,’ she said.

But either because of coincidence or the subtle psychological effects of Alvix’s breakthrough – the realisation that decades-long effort could provide sudden insight – Kenna’s attention would become distracted in a matter of days, as she broke through her own private research barrier. In her case, there was no one at all with whom to share the news.

A microscopic fragment of crystal suddenly wriggled under gamma-ray bombardment.

The manner in which that tiny sample had become not just liquid – though highly viscous – but actually motile . . . that might not have seemed like much, any more than spherical absorption rather than emission of radiation might be radically significant.

It might take decades more, even a century, to grow enough of the crystal to work with, and then to learn the ins and outs of engineering with the stuff; but it was a start.

Roger Blackstone’s dreams might come true.

Such a strange reason for the feeling of triumph that spread throughout Kenna’s dispersed, distributed self.

Five years later, the prototype Oraculum was ready, and a more hardened-looking Lord Alvix was getting ready to receive his noble visitors, the Lords and Ladies who had sunk finances into his project and were intrigued at the notion they might get a return sooner than expected.

Whether that was true, Kenna was less sure than Alvix. Lately the practicalities she had been dealing with had been those of engineering, helping develop new manipulation techniques that might some day help her directly, but for now were key to the manipulation of harvested spinpoints.

Those spinpoints were gathered by mini-drones in far orbit, and brought down to Nulapeiron by one of the master-drones that deVries had deployed fifty-six years ago.

Each spinpoint was a tiny seed, wrapped in magnetic fields and glowing in visible wavelengths once stabilised, and in the more energetic end of the spectrum before capture. A hall had been refashioned to hold them, with massive coils embedded in its walls, located close to the vertical shaft down which the master-drone descended, bearing its strange cargo.

In that hall, magnetic fields guided spinpoints into new carry-drones fashioned for the purpose, the lower surface of their carapaces formed of flowskin, so that they could move snail-like along the Palace corridors, bearing their magnetically trapped spinpoints, one per carry-drone.

Perhaps if it were not for the state in which Kenna herself existed, she would have felt more ethical concern at the treatment of the young people whom Alvix’s research team were hoping to turn into Oracles. The notion of perceiving the future, as described in primitive folklore, was ill-defined, akin to seeing distant events without technological intervention. But practical precognition was ‘simply’ one of future memory: of ‘remembering’ thoughts and perceptions from one’s own future mind.

‘It’s cosmology and the subatomic realm,’ Alvix had said at the start of the project, ‘going hand in hand yet again. That resonance between the cosmically large and attoscopically small has been fascinating scientists and now logosophers for hundreds of years.’

When Alvix had first sought investors, seven of the currently visiting Lords and Ladies had come to Palace Avernon, and attended a presentation in the Great Hall. There Alvix had projected a huge holo, of a globe filled with filaments and membranes of light surrounding empty spaces that looked like biological cells.

Each cell interior was in fact a cosmic void, and the tiniest points of light constituting those filaments and membranes represented galactic superclusters; because this was the entire realspace universe.

And of course, he caused it to shrink back to the tiny point that was the Big Bang, before expanding it to the fill the hall once more.

‘When I shrank the cosmos, as it were’ – Alvix had smiled at his audience – ‘was I predicting a Big Crunch, or showing expansion from the Big Bang in reverse?’

His point was that a universe as viewed from outside might be seen to shrink, but the cosmological arrow of time seemed predicated on the future always being the direction in which the universe was bigger. It indicated that timeflow might flip into reverse, should a Crunch occur.

And that meant you could never know whether you were in a universe that an outsider would say was expanding or collapsing.

‘Whether the whole of realspace will ever contract,’ he told them, ‘is irrelevant. We aim to create tiny regions of spacetime that shrink inwards to produce negentropic timeflow, and by stabilising them within normal reality, we have conduits via which to “remember” the future.’